Mentoring

This is very last minute as I have not been able to find enough people interested by directly approaching folks, but I have a great mentoring opportunity for Mozillians. One of my friends is a professor at Western Oregon University and tries to expose her students to a different Open Source project each term and up to bat this term is the Mozilla Project.

So I am looking for mentors from across the project who would be willing to correspond a couple times a week and answer questions from students who are learning about Firefox for Android or Firefox for Desktop.

It is ok not to be an expert on all the questions coming your way but if you do not know then you would help find the right person and get them the answers they need so they do not hit a roadblock.

This opportunity is open to both staff and contributors and the time commitment should not exceed an hour or two a week but realistically could be as little as twenty minutes or so a week to exchange emails.

Not only does this opportunity help expose these students to Open Source but also to contributing to our project. In the past, I have mentored students from WOU and the end result was many from the class continued on as contributors.

I have been busy for the past few weeks working with Asst. Professor Becka Morgan and her students at Western Oregon University where they are doing a test pilot class focusing on Open Source.

Asst. Professor Morgan selected Ubuntu as the Open Source project she wanted to focus on for this first pilot class and set out to connect with the Ubuntu Community. A few months back we connected and started the work of putting together a list of volunteer mentors which her students could access through their course and seek mentoring.

I feel that it is key for Academia to do much more than just use Free Open Source Software in the classroom and I think the key ingredient to having a solid course that focuses on Free Open Source Software is to get students engaged through mentorship so they can be guided on how to successfully get involved in all the various ways to contribute to a project.

At our Ubuntu Global Jam at FreeGeek last Sunday the Ubuntu Oregon LoCo came together with a handful of those students to spend an entire day learning about source packages and to report and fix bugs.

It is this close engagement that will give students they key to walking away with a stronger grasp of how to contribute to an open source project and while I do not believe our model of mentoring has gone without glitches and could use improvement I am hopeful that we can refine this model and improve the mentorship process.

I appreciate all of my fellow mentors who have been working to get the right resources in these students hands and appreciate the interest of the WOU students many of whom are attending our events and staying engaged in other ways.